School boards are an obstacle to education reform

Eighteen years ago, Denis Doyle and I wrote this in the New York Times:

"Local control of public education is on the way out, as the states take charge of school standards-setting, prescribe curriculum content and teacher qualifications, impose elaborate mechanisms of pupil testing and school accountability, equalize resources and offerings throughout their borders, and furnish the major portions of the school dollar. Until now, most states delegated control to local school boards, retaining only loose control in the state capital. That arrangement suited a stable agrarian society with a tolerance for local eccentricities, uneven outcomes, and school resources that varied with village property values and tax rights. Now governors and legislatures are vigorously asserting themselves. One consequence is that local school boards and superintendents are becoming obsolete: the "organizational dinosaurs of American education in the late 1980s,' a friendly observer calls them."

I submit that everything we wrote in 1985 is truer today, thanks to six notable developments in American education.

First, it's not just states that are asserting control of K-12 education. Now it's also Uncle Sam, as in the rulebook called No Child Left Behind.

Second, charter schools, vouchers, outsourcing, virtual education, and a hundred forms of school choice that scarcely existed in 1985 have begun to show what it means to devolve authority from a bureaucratic system to schools and families. Power is no longer just flowing upward from the local school system to the state and Uncle Sam. It's also flowing down to the building, the principal, the teaching team, the charter board and parents themselves. What important power, if any, remains to be exercised by the school board and superintendent?

Third, almost nobody now believes that public education should be a monopoly. Sure, it still is that in lots of places, but yesterday's geographically based, bureaucratically delivered, one best system is out of whack with how we organize and deliver everything else that we value. Imagine having only Kmart as a source of clothes, only the city clinic as a source of health care and only Nine Inch Nails as a source of music.

Fourth, there may still be some tranquil towns and leafy suburbs where the platonic ideal of the elected local school board flourishes, with the community's foremost citizens running in nonpartisan elections. But in the parts of U.S. education that cause the greatest concern, namely cities large and small, today's typical elected local school board resembles a dysfunctional family, comprised of three unlovable sorts: aspiring politicians for whom this is stepping stone to higher office, former school-system employees with a score to settle, and single-minded advocates of diverse dubious causes who yearn to use the public schools to impose their hang-ups on all the kids in town. No wonder reform-minded cities are trying every alternative they can think of: mayoral control, state takeovers, appointed boards, etc. The inventors of school boards thought their reform would keep education out of politics. In fact, it's immersed public schools in politics.

Fifth, we've also learned painful lessons about school board elections, namely that they're easily rigged. Yes, the teachers unions now dominate school board elections whenever they choose. So long as the board doesn't do anything, the union lies low. But let the board undertake reforms that the union doesn't like and it mobilizes.

What sort of democracy is that? Should a hospital's nurses elect its trustees? Should the UAW pick the board of GM? Should the executive branch of the federal government choose the Congress?

Sixth and finally, local school boards don't just resist change in their own communities. They also band together to fight it statewide. Second only to the unions, a state's school board association is usually the strongest protector of the education status quo.

This is also true at the national level. Whatever one's view of No Child Left Behind, it's a valiant effort to bring needed change. Where is the National School Boards Association on this? Singing the establishment anthem, which declares support for NCLB's intentions and then proceeds to pick apart almost every significant aspect of the law as unworkable. What message does that send to America's 15,000 local school boards?

None of the civic reformers who dreamed up public education's governance system in the late 19th century pictured such a creature. What we have today in the local school board, especially the elected kind, is an anachronism and an outrage. A dinosaur indeed. We can no longer pretend it's working well or hide behind the mantra of "local control of education." We need to steel ourselves to put this dysfunctional arrangement out of its misery and move on to something that will work for children.

Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Washington, D.C.